(Closed) We bought a house….now we’re broke for the wedding

Wow I didn’t know there was a board like this! Here’s my situation…..We’ve been together 6 years this month. Over the summer we starting house hunting and bought a house where we move in next week. Ever since we bought the house, his super Catholic parents are asking how many nights a week is he going to sleep over? They disapprove of him totally moving in before marriage. My boyfriend doesn’t want to get married just to appease his parents and also just drained his bank account for the down payment on the house. Last night we were talking about bills and how much stuff is going to cost, and he defeatedly said we won’t get married for another 5 years! That would put me at 33! (No offense to 33 yr old brides). I don’t think I can take another 5 years of living in limbo. He’s a chef so he wants our wedding to be amazing with gourmet food and all that. Is there anyone else in this situation? How long after you bought a house together were you able to be financially ready to get married?

(Hugs) I am 29 so I feel the same urgency. Do you think you could host a small wedding at your house and let him cook for your guests and hire a wait staff to serve? Are either set of parents willing to assist with the wedding?

I would see what his expectations are re: the cost and size of the wedding. Maybe you could scale it down a bit?

FI and I live in NYC so home ownership is a bit different (you need a very high percentage down payment, apartments are expensive, you have to pay maintenence fees, etc) We’re doing things the other way around — getting married and maybe buying an apartment in a few years. We’ve been living together for four years however.

We are in the opposite situation. We both own our own homes and just listed his house. We can afford both houses plus the wedding but what we are finding is that the banks won’t loan people $$ if the market price is above the tax appraised price. So that means we would take a 20K hit just to sell his home! We don’t want to lose money and if we do things would be tighter for the wedding. We were hoping to sell the house to save some money for the wedding. Who would have thought!

My point is this, get married now. The housing and money problems are always going to be there. If you wait then the next thing will be you want new furniture or need to put a new roof on the house. Or buy a car. You need to set a budget and work within that budget.

It is frustrating… but exciting to be so close to starting my family 🙂

I’m in a somewhat similar situation. We’re planning to buy a house in March 2010 and get married some time in the fall probably. I think what we’re going to do is just put the minimum down on the house, and start saving asap for a SMALL wedding. then after the wedding we’ll start paying over the minimum on the house to get up to 20% equity and eliminate pmi.

I don’t think I could wait 5 years either. We don’t have the money to have the huge’ over the top wedding of our dreams. So were going smaller, and DIY, and sticking to our budget. At the end of the day, we’ll be married and have our friends and family there and that’s all that matters. It’s not worth the wait to me.

my FI and i are sort of in the same situation. we bought a house together last aug. we weren’t yet engaged or anything like that. at the time we bought our house, we had been togeher over 4 years. i had been bringing up the marriage thing for a while and we were looking at rings here and there.

six months after we bought a house, FI’s golf club membership (membership to one of the most exclusive country clubs around) comes through, so that was another huge chunk of money we spent..

we just got engaged a month ago (YAY!!!!! after 5 years together) and have set our date in next oct (double YAY!!!)… needless to say, neither of us have much money, but figure that we’ve got a year to save.

We bought a house in May and got married in Sept. How’d we do it? Our wedding cost $1500. I only spent money on important things. Photography and clothes, pretty much. Everything else worked itself out, and we couldn’t be happier as a homeowners.